25th June 2008 Archive

Are you interested in home décor? Do you think friends more important than family? Does standing out in a crowd make you sweat? If you answered 'yes' to all of those questions, then you’re probably a PlayStation 3 owner, according to the latest research.

Nokia has paid €264m for outright ownership of Symbian, which sounds like a lot until you realise that's about what the Finnish giant will owe in royalty payments over the next 8 2* years, so the question becomes not why they bought Symbian, but why they are letting everyone else share the goodies.

Speculation a month or so back that Intel will soon be releasing a dual-core Atom processor failed to be followed by the anticipated announcement. Now we know why: shortages of the single-core version.

AMD has rolled out the Radeon HD 4870. The chip maker touted the GPU's ability to churn through more than a trillion floating-point calculations each second. It also heralded the part as the first to be connected to GDDR 5 memory.

Dealing with staff who misbehave on the web may be hampered by office policies written without Web 2.0 sites in mind, an employment expert has said. The warning follows disciplinary action against 18 police officers who boasted about crashes on Facebook.

Our recent piece on the terrorist paedophile bus-spotter driven off the UK's streets by public and police hostility prompted a certain amount of speculation as to what exactly are your rights when you whip off the lens cap.

A pro-marijuana group has come up with an ingenious plan to combat air rage - let passengers skin up before flying out of Denver International Airport (DIA) which has become "a hot spot for arrests of drunken, unruly airplane passengers", according to the Denver Post.

With still no official word from Acer on the Aspire One Eee PC rival's release date over here, we're left looking oversees for hints. Specifically to Thailand, where the Small, Cheap Computer is due to go on sale at the start of July.

Two high-profile tennis websites are among scores of victims of a new wave of SQL injection attacks. The website of game regulators ITF and ATP, the professional players tour, were hit by automated attacks in the run-up to this week's Wimbledon championship.

The civil service's systems will be subjected to new attacks by independent white hat hackers in a bid to spot weaknesses in government data handling before catastrophic losses occur, it was announced today.

The publication of a scientific paper by Radboud University that discusses design flaws of the MIFARE chip in cards such as the Oyster travelcard may be in jeopardy. Dutch secretary of state Tineke Huizinga has urged the university not to publish any secrets that may lead to abuse.

Charter Communications has suspended plans to deploy NebuAd's web usage tracking technology following howls of protest from critics who say that practice seriously compromised the privacy of subscribers.

We had an interesting conversation with Peter Cooper-Ellis, the guy who ran product management at BEA Systems from the time it acquired WebLogic and who's now taking on a similar role with SpringSource. Obviously, in the wake of the Oracle acquisition, it's not surprising that Cooper-Ellis jumped ship.

Cloud computing has its very own catch-22. If we can tap into the cloud, grabbing our compute resources on the fly, we can free ourselves from the old school software licensing models. But old school software licensing models may prevent us from tapping into the cloud.

Dell is fussing over itself again for being such a brilliant shade of eco-friendly green. No surprise. We dare say Michael Dell himself weeps a single tear of amber when you drop a paper coffee cup into the trash.